Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback!

You’re absolutely right that for someone without much technical background, self-hosting can be risky and overwhelming. But I believe that once someone wants to self-host, does a bit of research and is willing to learn, tools like Safebox can really help make that first step easier.

And yes, even for more experienced users, things can get messy after a while, and that’s also something we’re trying to simplify with Safebox.

It’s definitely not a perfect project or the ultimate solution, but it has already made our own lives easier, and hopefully it’ll do the same for others who want to get into self-hosting.

Hi, CasaOS is more like a lightweight home server os for running apps on a NAS-style setup. Safebox isn’t an os, it runs on top of any system with docker and handles domains, SSL, DNS and reverse proxy automatically. It also has built-in remote access and geo-redundant backup features, so it’s a bit more focused on simplifying the full self-hosting setup rather than app management

So my point I was driving at - especially with such a diverse offering of wireguard services which do not charge for (effectively) VPN access to your own infrastructure - I was more interested in why your service would be looking to pay gate it as a “premium” feature.

This would be different if we were talking you hosting all these services on your infrastructure but considering the marketing to homelab - I find it to be an unusual choice… And was curious as to the reason for the decision.

Right now, we’re not charging anything for our service. In the future, if we do, it would only cover things like domain registration, proxy setup, and some extra features such as monitoring and traffic analytics.

It’s important to mention that using our service isn’t required for Safebox to work. You can use your own domain provider, set up a VPS with a public IP, point your domain to it, and everything will work just fine.

I asked one of our developers to answer your other question since he can give you a more accurate answer.

Thanks for the suggestion, we’ll definitely look into it.

Since the software is open source, we’re not planning to block or restrict anything now or in the future. Right now we’re focused on development, and later we might build some services around it, but the software itself will always be free to use.

Our software is basically a web app that makes it easier to install and manage supported third-party apps. Wireguard (currently) is only used for remote access, if you don’t need that you don’t have to turn it on.

For security, everything runs in an isolated sandbox using docker and that also answers your other question.

We do plan to offer a paid remote access service in the future, but it’s totally optional. The same goes for backups, they can be geo-redundant if you use our service, but these are optional feature.

Thanks, yes we’re looking for early users and feedback

We’re just a family working together in our spare time. We want to make self-hosted web hosting easier to start and easier to use for everyone. We don’t have a business plan yet, we just want to build something useful and see what people think of it. Are you assuming it’s not open source because of the github page? We used Gitea before, and we’re moving everything over from there, that’s why it may look a bit empty right now.

Thanks! That’s a mistake, the pro version is currently completely free in beta.

The main difference is that Safebox is software that runs on any operating system with a single command using docker. There’s no need to use terminals and commands later on. Like Yunohost, you can install and manage self-hosted apps with it, but it also includes geo-redundant backup and remote access features, all in one interface.